Perfect Cadence
by notjustanapple
Summary: In the wake of the end of things, Faye departs on a journey of self-discovery.  Featuring road trips and inadvisable shots of vodka.
1. Chapter 1

**Perfect Cadence**

_Summary:_ In the wake of the end of things, Faye departs on a journey of self-discovery. But when ghosts of a past life begin to haunt her own waking dream, she must decide whether to accept her reality, or fight the path Fortune has laid before her. Featuring road trips and inadvisable shots of vodka.

_Warnings:_ PG-13 for language (so far), shifty verb tenses, severe lack of beta.

_Disclaimer:_ I don't own anything except for the laptop this was written on. Cowboy Bebop and its characters are the property of Bandai (or is it Sunrise?) and the brainchild of Shinichiro Watanabe. Just borrowing, folks.

* * *

It's been four months, and here she is again.

Despite all the shit that'd gone down, the nightmare that seemed like it would never end, she feels something pulling her here. It goes beyond mere wanderlust, more than her gypsy instincts whispering _run, run, and maybe this time you'll be free_.

No, this is more than that, and it fucking pisses her off.

Faye Valentine isn't one for nostalgia. Life is change. Adaptation. Evolution. She'd come here once before, looking for clues as to who she was and where she came from, and came up with little to nothing.

So, same as always, she's moving on. Moving a little further down the road. And yet…here she is. Staring at the blue pock-marked sphere that humanity once called home. And she has no clue why, except for a vague itch that she'd picked up on the Bebop a couple of days ago.

So she goes. And if she manages to nab the last of the ration bars from Jet's secret stash, well, she'll be back in plenty of time to blame it on the…

Well, not the dog, not anymore. Maybe the bonsais. She suppresses a snort; she can already see the old codger's face when she tells that one.

She sighs, and looks crossly out the cockpit of the Red Tail at the planet and its ring of trash. She isn't used to feeling this way: like someone's taking an eraser to her, leaving her smudged and dirty and raw. She supposes it's only to be expected, but that doesn't mean she can't be a little angry with herself about it. She's Faye Valentine, for fuck's sake! She's stronger than this!

She sighs again, closing her eyes and taking her hands off the controls after setting her ship to stay in orbit with the other pieces of scrapmetal. Things have been different, and yet all too familiar, since Spike left. In one way, his absence seems all too real. Colors spark and tumble where he should be—the tangy yellow couch, the sharp contrast between the void and the lights inside. Spices usually meant to disguise less fresh foods have suddenly been tasting like minor explosions in her mouth. Each clang of the ship, each muttered curse from Jet's mouth—they reverberate in the stillness, and their echoes have been creeping into her dreams.

And despite all this, much like his final words, she herself feels like a dream. Like everything she does is merely a prelude to the next act. On the Bebop, hidden away in her room, she'd slept and woke, only to repeat the process the next day, and the next. Each day she would open her eyes and ask, "Is this the day I wake up?" only to remember that she had. Some part of her supposes she's been grieving for the stupid lunkhead, but in general she's just too apathetic to give it much thought.

Then, one day not too long ago, she did snap awake, and decided to stop moping and start moving. She'd taken on a few bounties with Jet's help; chump change, really, but it'd been just what she needed to kick start her life again. To make the leap from life-with-Spike to life-without. To continue the evolution that was Faye's shitty life.

She laughs a little, the sound coming out half-hysterical and shaky. A few days ago she'd been digging around Spike's room (Jet was safely off-ship grocery shopping) for a cigarette and had instead found a battered old book of Roman history stashed behind Spike's bed. She'd read it out of boredom, but mostly out of the sheer novelty of Spike owning a hardcover. One of the pages had been dog-eared, and on that page there'd been an image of a goddess: a woman, blindfolded and balancing on a sphere, scales in one hand, cornucopia in the other.

The picture had been labeled Fortuna, and she had first laughed her ass off imagining the stupid asshole finding that inspirational, or ironic, or whatever the hell his twisted mind decided to come up with. Then she'd sobered very quickly when she realized how very…easily the image explained her own life.

She'd always had a notion that somebody up there had it in for her, and now she had her validation. Whenever it came to Faye Valentine, Lady Luck just keeps falling off the ball and poking herself in the eye with the pointy end of her scales.

To put it simply: Faye just isn't the luckiest card in the draw.

She rummages around under her seat, looking for her pack of cigarettes, and comes up with a broken nail file, half a cigar, and a fair bit of lint. She stares, mutters, "What the hell," tosses the trash back under the chair, and lights up.

It isn't fair, she thinks. But then, when has fate ever been? She's stopped wasting time wondering who she was long ago, stopped trying to hang onto threads of a person she'd never really been in the first place. Living with Spike has taught her a lesson, one she's been learning the hard way ever since she'd been dragged out of her cold sleep:

You take your cake and eat it too, because lord knows when your next slice of sweet, sugary deliciousness will come around.

She takes a good long drag, savoring the complex flavor, before blowing a couple of smoke rings just to prove she can. Spike hadn't understood this. He lived and ate and slept and caught bounties, then did it all again when the next day arrived. He'd argued and fought and yelled, but with a glazed look in his eyes, as if torn between one world and the next. She's never been able to see the appeal of living in yesterday, of walking forward but looking over one shoulder all the while.

But then, who would Spike be without his past? Faye isn't stupid: she knows part of what had intrigued her about him was the fact that he was a broken man, shattered once, twice, a dozen times, then put back together with yarn and glue. Or chewing gum and dental floss. Every woman would have the same urge to hide him away under her pillow and never let go. Unfortunately for her, that asshole was just prickly enough, and she, just proud enough, that she'd never followed through on the desire.

And now he was dead. Which brings her back to the whole 'living a life worth dying for' thing. Which just makes her angry, and a little sad. She takes another drag, and watches the smoke curl around itself. She regrets that she'd never taken advantage of her good fortune, but that is really what it comes down to, isn't it?

Regret.

"You never know what you have until it's gone," she tells the planet sardonically, unsurprised when it didn't reply. She takes one last puff of her cigar, snuffs it out on the console, grips the controls, and starts navigating through the junk towards the surface.

With the sun's rays peeking around the horizon, the descending ship turns into a streak of fire. She doesn't hesitate, doesn't stop to look back, just keeps moving forward, because doing anything different gets you killed.

She pulls a shit-eating grin out from somewhere and plasters it across her face as she fights against gravity to not get smeared across the ground like so much Faye-pudding. This is the smile that gets her into more scraps than not—the smile that pissed off Jet and Spike and made Ed laugh and clap her hands in delight.

This is _her_ life. She'll fix it, or fuck it up, or end up fat and married with 2.5 children and a white picket fence. Her choice, her call, and she'll be damned if something like her insecurities or her rotten luck ruin her chance to have a chance. A chance to change. To grow.

Suddenly, the urge to come back to Earth doesn't seem quite so strange anymore, and is starting to look more appealing by the minute.

Smirk still firmly in place, Faye murmurs mostly to herself, and partly to the cosmos, "Isn't this just the perfect weather for a flight?"

She imagines that the answer is a unanimous and resounding _yes_.

* * *

Jet knows the moment he walks through the bay door that the shrew-woman has left. There are clues scattered here and there, not least of them being the fact that the Red Tail is gone from its spot in the hangar. The sweet-sharp smell of _woman_ is gone, replaced by a coldness he'd all but forgotten in the whirlwind life with three other people and a dog.

Some small part of him is cheering with joy that he might have his sweet, blessed solitude back, but most of him is just depressed that the last of his makeshift family has departed for greener pastures.

It'd always been a touch-and-go situation with his crew-mates. They hadn't been tied down like he was with things like home and living and responsibility. But yet, that didn't mean he couldn't hope they'd find some measure of belonging on the Bebop, like he had.

He walks down the hallway and past the living room (_doesn't even glance around for fear of seeing a ghost_) and into the kitchen, setting the two bags of groceries down on the counter. He begings to put the various foodstuffs away, mind carefully blank. Bread goes in this cupboard; eggs in the fridge. Bell peppers are set by the stove, along with some onions. When he gets to the fruit, efficient hands pause, and he ends up staring dumbly at the little bag's contents.

Plums. Faye'd bitched about nutrition and diet and scurvy for so long that he'd decided on this grocery trip to just give in and get the damn woman what she wanted. "I can't believe you'd want a beautiful woman like me to end up with rotting teeth and open sores," she'd whined, and he'd muttered something vague about vitamin C tablets and picky women, pretending not to pay her any attention.

He'd listened, though, like he always did, and had picked up a bag of plums on the way out of the market. Not much point in them now, though.

Leaving his chore unfinished, Jet turns around and marches straight out of the kitchen into the cockpit. He tries not to think about it, but he does, and now it is time for forgetting. The rest of the groceries can wait.

He rummages around underneath the console by the co-pilot's chair, pulling out a bottle of brandy he'd stashed when Spike and Faye weren't looking. Sitting himself carefully among the controls, he stares at his reflection before looking through the glass at the icy blackness of space.

There's been days where he's felt all his 36 years creeping up behind him like some menacing Boogieman of his childhood nightmares. Those days are coming more frequently, and by and by, Jet's come to the opinion that he's gotten old. Fact is, he's just too old to deal with those hooligans and their antics. He tries to console himself with the thought that he'll never have to again, but that just brings all kinds of melancholy on him.

Jet wrenches the bottle open indelicately, but pauses before taking a swig. He isn't just drinking for himself, much as he'd like to: he's drinking for Spike and his fucked-up ending, as long ago as that is. He's drinking for Ed and Ein, wherever they are, searching for a place called home. He's drinking for Faye, the last of his strays to go, drifting to god-knows-where and looking for hints about her lost past. He's drinking for them all, and he'll pay them their due.

"Cheers, guys," he says to his reflection, mind's eye painting them in beside him in varying states of chaos, raising the bottle. Smiling at his memories, drinking to his friends, he forgets everything a little while longer.

* * *

Ein is not the sort of dog to stop and question whenever something smells fishy. Except for that one time with the can of tuna that silly Faye-woman had tried to eat. He warned her, he did, he was a good dog and tried to let her know that it was most definitely off, but she never listened. Karma comes in all shapes and sizes, he supposes.

But when Ed leaves the Bebop, leaves their own territory smelling sweet and musty like bouquets of dying flowers, he knows something's wrong. He's a smart dog; he knows when his humans are feeling bad.

He follows behind his Ed-person, trying to stay aware of everything and everyone they're passing, because Ed-person is too wrapped up in whatever she's singing about to make sure they're not walking into a situation. The streets of the tiny Mars town they've arrived in (_and wasn't that a fun ride on the hover-bus, with the wind in his face and the two physics professors arguing quantum theory a couple of seats down_) is quaint, sure, but he's been chased and hounded—he laughs with a loll of his tongue—far too long to stop his vigilance.

Not to mention the business that Spike-man got involved in, with those suits. The possibility that Spike-man's ridiculous feud with the mob might somehow drag his Ed-person down is low, less than 4.27%, but Ein hasn't survived for long by ignoring improbabilities. He factors it into his long-term plans for survival and comfort, and settles his hindquarters firmly beside Ed-person, who crouches at the mouth of an alley to whip out her laptop and bash at it viciously.

First on his list is food. Ed-person is growling in time with her stomach, and while he can go for a while without a decent meal, growing humans can't, so it's off to the dumpster with him.

He trots off down the alleyway, hops lightly between several conveniently placed crates, and lands in a pile of rancid trash. Most of it is unfit for human consumption, but not his, he thinks, as he scarfs down half a hamburger from a ripped white bag. Somehow he manages to come across a small tub of what smells like kimchi fried rice. Too bad he doesn't have opposable thumbs, though, because all he can do is grip it between his teeth and take it back to his person.

"Ein-puppy, what'd you bring me?" Ed-person squeals when he finally manages to drag her attention away from her computer long enough to notice him. "Looks like…" she trails off, struggling and biting at the seal until it pops open, "…kimchi for dinner! Yay! One, two, three—" she sings, counting in Korean, whipping out her favorite chopsticks, and digging in.

Ein rolls his eyes, waits a few seconds to make sure her meal holds her attention, shuffles to her computer. Pawing a few buttons, he starts darting through the files she's left open. Shipping schedules, itineraries, copies of receipts, invoices, bills, private emails, internal memos—

He blinks. Neurons fire, vague connections appear. A pattern aligns. Conclusions form.

Ein smiles a doggy smile, barks, and closes the laptop, ignoring Ed-person's squawks of dismay and the pieces of rice and kimchi that she flings onto his ear. It's time to go. He winds through her legs and pushes her to movement, hoping to get lost even further before they bunk down for the night.

Improbabilities have an odd way of becoming certainties, Ein knows, knows that randomness isn't something for which any being can plan. If he were human, he might have the hubris to think he could play the odds—like the Spike-man did so many times, and look how that turned out—but Ein isn't human. He's just able to see how chance whispers through his humans' lives.

And in this instance, his belief in chance, in tracking the _possible-probable-likely, _might be able to fix the smell of sadness lingering around Ed-person and the rest of the Bebop.


	2. Chapter 2

**Perfect Cadence**

_Summary:_ In the wake of the end of things, Faye departs on a journey of self-discovery. But when ghosts of a past life begin to haunt her own waking dream, she must decide whether to accept her reality, or fight the path Fortune has laid before her. Featuring road trips and inadvisable shots of vodka.  
_Rating:_ R_  
Disclaimer:_ I don't own anything except for the laptop this was written on. Cowboy Bebop and its characters are the property of Bandai (or is it Sunrise?) and the brainchild of Shinichiro Watanabe. Just borrowing, folks.

**

* * *

**

"So what'll it be, missy?" the toothless man behind the counter wheezes when she walks through the bar doors. The interior of the building isn't that much different from the outside—grungy, bland, and dusty—though with the addition of a bit of mold on the ceiling.

Faye had thought she'd start her new-whatever-this-is with a toast, but she's beginning to rethink her decision. She glances around the room; besides the bartender, it's just her and three other less-than-appealing individuals, who seem to be engrossed in a three-way game of checkers.

What the hell. It's not really her scene, but she's craving something to help her forget the fact that she has no idea what to do next.

"I'll have a mimosa, please," she says primly, seating herself on a stool (after surreptitiously wiping it down with a cocktail napkin). The radio stationed between bottles of whiskey lets out a low mutter, and the bartender turns around for a second, adjusting a few knobs.

"Got no bubbly," he says, now banging on the sad piece of equipment with a fist, "Whiskey, beer, or vodka." The radio groans and screeches, and Faye suddenly feels the urge to commit homicide. Now, should she aim for the man or the machine..?

Never one for self-denial, she says "Give me a double vodka and the bottle, then, and stop with the banging or I shoot the damn thing." She rests her arms on the counter and leans forward, waiting. The old man turns eventually, and looks her in the eye, and she continues, "Through you."

"...Ain't no need for violence or threats," he mutters, looking away, but the promise of business must be too sweet to pass up, because he shuffles towards the vodka without a second word.

Satisfied, Faye reaches out and starts tapping a rhythm out on the cracked wood, losing interest in the proceedings. She supposes it might be a good idea to think about what, exactly, she's doing here, to plan out a course of action instead of just winging it, like she always does.

Not that spontaneity is a bad thing. She's vaguely certain that almost every plan she's ever made has ended in danger, disappointment, or death. So then maybe thinking about this is a bad idea, and she really should just focus on her booze, because she's getting progressively more esoteric (and thus more stupid) with each spare thought.

The near-simultaneous impact of a bottle in front of her and a meteoroid in the not-so-distant distance jolts her out of her circular thoughts. She jumps a little – okay, a lot, but she plays it cool. The bartender moves further down the bar. The three men in the corner don't even twitch.

Feeling a little embarrassed, she grabs her glass and takes a long gulp. What she doesn't manage to drink somehow manages to lodge in a lung, because fuck, that is rancid. She wonders briefly how long it's been since she's kicked back straight vodka.

When she coughs, a near-invisible plume of dust drifts off the warped wood counter, and toothless wonder a few feet away shoots her a glare, scolding in a way that says 'thanks for ruining years of hard work'.

Her lip curls. "What, you were too caught up in the thriving night life to actually do your job? I thought that's what bartenders did, you know. Wiped down _their bars_," she says, darting a hand up to wipe a stray tear from her eye.

He ignores her in favor of turning back to the radio and giving one last turn of the dial. By some miracle, it sputters back to life.

"…chance of meteor showers in District 16 today is 60%...chance of meteor showers in District 17 today is 25%..." a too-cheerful-to-be-anything-but-a-creepy-machine voice informs the bar. The three men in the corner shush each other loudly, and even the old prune behind the counter cocks an ear while he wipes a couple of glasses.

Faye just groans and pours herself another shot. The other inhabitants of the bar seem to have frozen, and Faye tries not to judge, but she's always been shit at that, to be honest. Because, come on, it's more than a little pathetic to be that obsessed with a freaking meteorology report. Especially when it's not even accurate, most of the time.

Faye takes another shot. Her vodka goes down easy, but her mind slides even more easily into dark thoughts. Were she anywhere else besides this tragedy of a town, she would put up a fight.

She leans on an elbow and dangles her glass from her fingers. Well, Earth had been a bit of tragedy to begin with. If it's one thing people are good at, it's aiming for a big juicy twelve-point buck and somehow ending up shooting themselves in the foot. Sure, they'd managed to recover from the massive clusterfuck that was the Gate catastrophe, but Faye had always attributed that more to luck and people's ability to imitate cockroaches than actual skill.

And now people are spreading further and further into the solar system, and only God knows what new messes they'll create next.

…Fuck. She always forgets it's the clear stuff that turns her into a misanthrope (she's no Dostoevsky, something whispers, but that's insane because she's neither Russian nor well-read).

Time to pull on Poker Alice and get out of here. She yawns, mutters, "Now what?", and takes her last shot. Sometime between the meteor landing way too close for her comfort and philosophizing, she'd inhaled a good three-fourths of the vodka. It's going to be interesting getting the Redtail off the ground.

"If you're wanting a room, I recommend heading down to Tucumcari," the barkeep says, and Faye really must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, because she thought that Tucumcari only had a Mexican food joint, a gas station, and some concrete. She says as much to the barkeep.

"Where have you been? That was before the world turned into a giant piece of Swiss cheese. Tucumcari's practically urban, now." The man makes a strange shooing gesture that could either mean "Go on, get," or "Go on, finish your booze and dance the Macarena on my bartop."

Faye decides to stick with the former.

"Keep the change," she says, throwing a couple of woolongs onto the counter and standing up. The world spins for a moment, but she's used to that, so she blinks and tips a jaunty salute in the bartender's direction, and exits the bar.

Outside, the sun is kissing the horizon. A layer of dust has settled like a mist over the town—Faye inhales too much and snorts indelicately into her palm—which makes the sunset seem distant.

It's the kind of atmosphere that makes her eyelids grow heavy of their own accord (the vodka probably had something to do with that), but she pinches her arm and somehow manages to stumble over to her Redtail's hiding spot.

"Hello, baby," Faye may or may not croon to her ship's polished red surface, and imagines it gives her a happy chirrup when she opens the hatch. She has none of her usual grace as she tumbles into the cockpit: her elbow bashes against the dash, and her head ends up crammed into the space between the chair and the wall.

It's not the most comfortable position she's been in.

On the bright side, she finds her favorite hair clip and a credit chip with 20,000 woolongs, so she decides to look at it like it's meant to be.

Eventually, she rights herself, and gets her hands around the controls. The start-up sequence is so easy she doesn't have put much thought into it—actually, she's not capable of much thought at all, right now—and she goes through the motions, staring out at the way the horizon has changed from orange and reds to a light green.

The rest of the sky is all blues and purples and blacks, and wow, if Faye didn't know that most of those stars up there are just the ring of trash around the planet, she'd think she could understand why people all those years ago were obsessed with going into space.

It's an odd sight, but she has an even odder feeling that she's seen it before. Which shouldn't even be that odd, because she'd spent at least two decades here. Well, before being slapped into a freezer and shipped to Mars.

God, she'll never get over that, will she? She knows who she is, knows who Faye Valentine is today, but she doesn't quite know who she was before. Even with the video, even with going to her childhood home. She doesn't even know what her last name was, back then.

Faye does know that her younger self was naïve and optimistic to the point of pain, and that she'd been a cheerleader—which always makes her gag when she thinks about it—and that she'd looked good even then in short shorts.

(When she watched that video, Faye made sure to notice the important details.)

Then again, she doesn't know what made her younger self tick, what she felt passionate about, what her dreams were, what her favorite subject was in school, what her friends were like. She doesn't know anything in detail, and sometimes it makes her feel like a ghost.

Bah. Faye shakes her head, trying to dispel the alcohol-induced haze and crappy mood, but unfortunately, it sticks. The Redtail is purring softly, now, so she closes the hatch and sets off in a vaguely southeastern direction.

At least she hopes it's southeast. She'd put it on autopilot, except that lovely feature had been damaged when Faye spilled coffee all over the console. At the time, she'd thanked fuck she hadn't destroyed anything else; now, she's kicking herself for not getting Jet to fix it before she left.

For what could be anywhere for a few minutes to a few hours, Faye drifts in and out of focus. The world outside her ship is all blurry shapes and indescribable darkness, made more intimidating because of the particular tang of its emptiness. Space is one thing—a vacuum filled with routes from which people don't dare stray—but out here? There could be all manner of unknown quantities lurking in the nothingness.

That doesn't keep her from paying only the bare minimum of attention, though. She thinks she nods off only a few times, but that's enough. That's all it takes.

Faye falls asleep at the controls on the way to Tucumcari, and wakes up slumped over the console the next day, surrounded by broken metal and melted glass—her Redtail totaled, smoking, and embedded precariously in the side of a cliff.

* * *

Peace. Calm.

Zen.

Jet is totally, completely fine with this silence on his ship. Embraces it, even.

It's such a joy to wake up in the mornings to the sweet sound of nothing ringing through the halls. He doesn't have to fight certain people for his share of dinner, doesn't trim his bonsai to nubs when individuals bounce into the room spouting outrageous bullshit.

He doesn't even have to put up a ship-wide notice to avoid the head after he's used it.

…oh, who is he kidding? He's turning into a true hermit, the flavor of pathetic who deludes himself into thinking he's perfectly happy being alone. The kind who makes a point of relishing the _sound of absolutely nothing happening_.

This is ridiculous. It's time to get some human contact.

Jet makes his way to the hangar, thinking of taking the Hammerhead over to a bar and getting drunk in the company of other idiots like him, maybe finding a woman and taking her back to her apartment.

Yeah, that's what he'll do.

He walks up to the Hammerhead, then veers off, opens the hangar doors, and goes out on the deck, instead.

He ends up sitting on the edge of the Bebop, watching the hustle of the ships around him as they settle onto the waters. A few are fishing, but it's the completely wrong time of day for Rock Lobsters, and some big wig decided to make fishing for Sea Rats a grand felony, so it's not surprising that the majority of the fishing fleet are stationary.

Jet doesn't know why he expected Ganymede to be any different, since the last of his stand-in family left, but he had. And he'd been right, to an extent.

If he were to guess the reality of it, actually, he'd have to suppose that whatever changes he thinks he sees are because he sees things in a different light than he did before.

His loneliness has faded to a comfortable ache, now, more familiar to him than the thought of superficial interactions with strangers. Jet's always been the kind of fool who'd rather sit alone on his ship than fake interest in some random person's problems.

He does need to find something to do, though. He almost wishes he could go back to the ISSP and join up with the old crew again; it's where he started, where he found purpose and brotherhood.

It's starting to get darker, and the fishing trawlers are starting to drop their nets and move. Jet wonders briefly if he should move the Bebop out of the way, but they glide past him without complaint. One flashes a fisherman's hello as it passes, and he raises his arm in reply before realizing they probably can't see him in the deepening dusk.

He shrugs, sheepish, craning his head around to watch the small dark forms scramble around the surface of the passing ship, pulling and tying nets here and there, efficient in their chaos. It looks almost fun—he laughs, thinking it would be even more fun to be the one giving the orders, rather than getting coated in fish guts and rope burns.

And that's when it hits him.

Origins. Purpose.

The Bebop.

That's what he'll do.

…Does he still have those nets in the storage room? Or did Ed appropriate them for that trampoline, that one time..?

* * *

The second time she wakes up, it's a matter of moments before she remembers, squeals, and manages to bounce Ein to the next mattress over. The corgi lands on his side and whimpers, sneezing as a cloud of dust and debris explodes into the air. Ed giggles and leaps and pirouettes when she lands, shouting "TAG YOU'RE IT!" and taking off again, Ein in hot pursuit.

Sunlight is streaming in through a battalion of broken windows in the abandoned mattress factory. They'd stumbled into it last night, Ed clutching a stolen bag of tangerines and Ein gripping the handles of a bag of fried chicken feet between his teeth. Ed had thought they'd found paradise, and when she'd told her friend that, he'd just rolled his eyes and crawled onto the mattress closest to them and passed out.

They play for a while, laughter and barks spilling into the empty room, then settle down for breakfast. Ed pretends it's a feast, and she's a king surrounded by her adoring courtiers.

"Mm, yes, my good fellow, please do pass the gravy. No, not that gravy, the other one, yes, thank you." Ed whips out her virtual goggles and tightens them slightly, placing them on her brow like a crown.

Ein barks.

"What a delicious spread we have here, no? It's practically _sinful_!" she gives a little shimmy.

Ein gnaws on a chicken foot and ignores her.

Her goggles slip onto her face, so Ed pulls out her computer and plays around a bit, then lets out a cry of utter betrayal. "Ein, you bad puppy, you've been on Ed's computer! Without Ed!"

She scrolls through the search history—deleted files! The nerve!—and reconstructs Ein's work. "Ed thought we agreed—oh. Ooh!" Jackpot!

Ein whines and shoves his head under a mattress.

"Now now, my dear Watson," she affects a Holmesian air, "it wouldn't do to ignore the trail. There's mystery afoot!" she crows, rolling onto her side and wiggling her feet into Ein's side, ignoring his guilty squirming.

Her fingers keep dancing through the air, putting the finishing touches on her masterpiece, until finally—

"IT LIVES!" Ed jumps up and shakes her fists at the ceiling, triumphant. "Ha ha! You thought you could hide it from me, but haven't you heard?" She pauses for dramatic effect (adopted from late-night re-runs of pre-Gate soap operas) then clasps her hands under her chin, smiles, and whispers, "Puzzles are my middle name."

A stray sunbeam glances off her goggles and gives her expression an unholy light.

From under the mattress, Ein gives a doggy groan.

* * *

Two figures meet in a darkened room, their conversation almost eclipsed by the sound of machines whirring, beeping, monitoring, dispensing oxygen and blood and other fluids, disposing of waste. They stand at the foot of a bed, and with a crumple of plastic and the hiss of a match, the face of one appears briefly, then fades back to shadowed obscurity.

Inhale.

"Any change?"

"No, and they're talking about brain damage, now."

"…Shit. Really?"

Exhale. "Yeah. If there's no sign of improvement, they've got no choice but to turn it all off." The glow of the cigarette moves in a general motion around the bed.

Pause. Inhale.

"You know we can't let that happen."

Exhale. "Already looking into it. I'll have an answer by Thursday."

"Good."

One figure leaves. The other stays a moment more, staring at the bed, then nods, crushes the cigarette under one heel, and walks out the door. It closes softly.

The machines continue.

Inhale. Exhale.

* * *

Sorry for the delay. It took something of a miracle to get this chapter on the road. I have outlines and notes, though, and a vision of where this is going, and I suppose the biggest questions that I look forward to answering is: What kind of place is CB's Earth? What breed of people does it take to survive there?

And this is a standing order: if this story should ever get too far-fetched, out of hand, OOC, or just plain stupid, don't be afraid to let me know. I'm a big girl.


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